Michelangelo Pistoletto: A Theater for Everyone Jonathan Goodman The remarkable art of Michelangelo Pistoletto encompasses many media: painting, sculpture, and performance are chief among his means of expression. Very much a child of the of the 1960s, Pistoletto started with an art that actively includes his audience; his mirror paintings, begun in 1962 and made with a tissue-paper image fixed onto a polished, stainless steel surface, reflect the viewers who make their way into the reflecting surface to look at the image. The inclusion of Pistoletto’s audience generates a theater that changes according to the patterns of activity taking place within the painting’s reflective field. Pistoletto, whose accomplishments include the creation of Lo Zoo, a contemporary commedia dell’arte group that created street theater for public audience in the late 1960s, sees his work as an open invitation to act in order to become and to be— ways of existence that emphasize public action of an undirected sort. Basically an improvisatory artist whose efforts reflect, literally and figuratively, the actions of himself and others, Pistoletto has created an art that maintains a dialogue implying a radical communication—albeit a conversation that does not directly entertain a leftist view of art. Indeed, unlike the late Marxist sculptor Mario Merz, who along with Pistoletto is one of the best-known Arte Povera (Poor Art) practitioners, Pistoletto has seen fit to produce a stance more politically invisible in nature. His art often depends on a staged performance, in which chances are taken to enhance a fluid spectrum of activities. These actions do not challenge the status quo so much as they encourage a dialogue in which conventional values are questioned in favor of a living theater, which Pistoletto hopes will result in a common ground of thought and activity. The shared attention his artworks demand turn on the notion of a democratized theater, one that involves the audience both physically and metaphysically. Even Pistoletto’s sculptures, known as Minus Objects, exist as freestanding events in which the viewer participates as an active force. The relations between artist and audience are essentially syncretic and mutually supportive, in ways that contrast with Minimalism, the American sculptural movement that was taking place at the same time in the 1960s and 1970s. In fact, unlike Minimalism, whose forbidding pieces are looking more and more like a homage to rather than a critique of industrial monumentality, Arte Povera’s politics encompass a democratic view of art, one that would embrace the public. This embrace must be regarded as a leap of faith as well as a political act. Pistoletto has not deliberately politicized his art, although the mirror paintings document the free will of those seen on their surface, and the productions of Lo Zoo took theater into the streets. Instead, he seeks a socially aware discussion of art’s ability to reify emotion, thought, and—just as important—the physical selves of his public. This, then, is an inspired improvisation, a theater for everyone. One of his most interesting works is Quadro da pranza (Lunch Painting), done in 1965, which consists of a skeletal wooden frame almost a foot and a half wide, in which simple right-angled seats and a table, made of the same wood, form the image in its entirety. The frame extends just far enough from the wall to allow actual participants to have lunch while sitting on the seats. The work is not only a magical case of viewer interaction, it also possesses a remarkable graphic virtuosity, and we remember that, at the age of twenty in 1953, Pistoletto enrolled in an advanced school of advertising in Turin. But beyond the sheer ingenuity of the piece, it is also a call to action, if only to so simple a recreation as eating lunch. We know that the public nature of Pistoletto’s work argues for an awareness of the public nature of life; we are responsible, as in the mirror paintings, for the consequences of our events, composed as they are of private meaning and, hopefully, public virtue. While it is true that the Arte Povera movement reacted against corporate values and used materials of humble origins, it also sought a far-reaching transformation of art itself. Yet its position was just as synthetic as it was confrontational, in the sense that it posited art activity as the next best thing—that is, as what would follow an inherently open position in regard to culture. I do not mean to minimalize the importance of political opposition in Arte Povera, whose very name projects a democratic rather than elitist understanding of art. Italy in 1968 and 1969 was a volatile place, part of a concerted, nearly global effort to realize a world of greater equality. Theater was one way of transforming social roles by erasing difference, with the sharp awareness that history, both as esthetic form and political reality, projects from the past into the present. One of the most striking works by Pistoletto is the 1965-66 Scultura linea (Wooden Sculpture), in which an antique, heavily abraded wooden sculpture of a woman has been placed into an open, orange Plexiglas container, which rises to the sculpture’s middle point. Here the plastic orange encircling the work acts as a scrim through which we see the wooden piece from a decidedly contemporary point of view. Yet the Plexiglas container encompasses only the lower half of the sculpture, which is also allowed a meaningfulness in a historical sense. The object is found, but its housing is constructed from a highly contemporary material. The contrast is just and also essentially descriptive—Pistoletto creates a juxtaposition of materials to relate a juxtaposition of kinds of mind. The young woman is literally worn down by time, while the orange Plexiglas shows no signs of wear. As a result, the two exist in a public dialogue about the meaningfulness of art, during a time when historical process itself was being challenged by a radicalization of art’s motivation The title of the show at the Philadelphia Museum (which will travel to the Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XXI Secolo in Rome [March 3-June 26, 2011]), was “Michelangelo Pistoletto: From One to Many, 1956-1974”; the subtitle implies an extension, a greater expansiveness, in which everyone is invited as a participant/observer within the construct of art as theater. Scultura linea has been damaged by the centuries, yet it remains capable of engaging us. In light of its effects, we understand that there is no reason why art of the moment should give up the effort to forge awareness of one’s position as a viewer, which holds values that are as impressive, and also as expressive, as the historical figure surrounded by orange plastic. Mirror Paintings If we return to the analogy of the theater, we can see that Pistoletto’s mirror paintings clearly provide us with an instantaneous dialogue, positing visual inventiveness in the form of reflection. By including the audience in the painting, Pistoletto shows us how we participate in both an actual and an imagined reality, with the latter acting as a support but also a critique of real life. The mirror paintings give access to a measured participation, whereby the viewer commands part of the reality of the artwork. Indeed, we move from the one to the many, just as the show’s title says, because anyone can complete the painting. Democracy of a radical kind becomes available in Pistoletto’s art, which closes the gap between artist and community. This suggests that the artist has been interested in democratic values from the start, intending to widen the audience for his paintings, sculptures, and actions. Like the other Poveristi, Pistoletto finds truth in an informality that emphasizes the moment, and its communication, over a sense of formal completion. But I do not mean to say that Pistoletto is primarily a process artist—his sense of the object as a discrete thing is very strong and highly imaginative. It is the contrasting dialogue between his art’s needs and his perceived needs of the audience that makes his art so unforgettable. It was in 1961 that Pistoletto found himself looking at a heavily varnished background of an unfinished painting, which reflected his image back to himself. He then understood that he could copy his likeness not by looking into a mirror but by gazing at himself directly in the canvas. This led to the exciting event of 1962: the creation of unprecedented, wonderfully original mirror paintings, in which the artist would paint from photos of people onto tissue paper attached to a highly polished, large, vertically aligned rectangle of polished stainless steel; later paintings incorporated the photographic images as silkscreens. The steel background inevitably reflects its surroundings, in and out of which actual people move. In the mirror paintings generally, the visitor’s activities generated an unpredictable theater whose events were best seen and understood by those responsible for them. A 1963 self-portrait (Pistoletto began his career with a series of self-portraits) on polished stainless steel shows the artist squatting, wearing a blue shirt, brown pants, and brown shoes in a 120-cm-square format. Posing on the left side of the painting, Pistoletto has kept the rest of the steel untouched, lacking other figures so that it would be easy for a viewer to find himself in its surface. Thus, one becomes complicit with the overall composition; in this work, one takes on a physical (if imaginary) relationship with the artist himself. So it happens that Pistoletto’s audience in the mirror paintings are never innocent bystanders—they are needed to complete the work of art.